Most of us remember Florence Nightingale as a heroic Nurse during the Crinean War in Turkey where she nursed British soldiers. She was not only a nurse but also a statistician. She collected data to show that the death rate in military hospitals decreased when the sanitation methods were improved. She developed a polar area graph to graphical display the results of her data collection. They looked like:
Florence Nightingale became a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society in 1858 and an honorary member of the American Statistical Association in 1874.